Events

How to be an Ethical Computer Scientist

Speaker: Moshe Vardi

Location: 60 Fifth Avenue, Room 150

Date: Friday, February 10, 2023

Many of us got involved in computing because programming was fun.  The advantages of computing seemed intuitive to us.  We truly believed that computing yields tremendous societal benefits; for example, the life-saving potential of driverless cars is enormous!  Recently, however, computer scientists realized that computing is not a game -- it is real -- and it brings with it not only societal benefits, but also significant societal costs, such as labor polarization, disinformation, and smart-phone addiction. A common reaction to this crisis is to label it as an "ethics crisis". But corporations are driven by profits, not ethics, and machines are just machines.  Only people can be expected to act ethically. In this talk the speaker will discuss how computer scientists should behave ethically.

This talk is presented by the NYU Center for Responsible AI as part of its Responsible AI Rockstar Series, and is supported by Courant Computer Science and by the Center for Data Science. It will be followed by a reception at 60 5th Avenue, in the 7th floor open area.